Week 3

It's been a short week, since the 4th of July was on Monday.  I spent most of the week doing interview coding.  We are looking at 11 specific people who persisted in engineering jobs, and comparing the skills and knowledge they thought were important in their junior year and in their jobs now.  Several had one skill overlapping, but they mostly have new lists of important skills.  We are also looking at how they defined engineering, and if their perceptions of an engineering job have changed since their undergraduate years.  Some people's changed in a more positive way, as they maybe discovered new opportunities or more unexpected flexibility in their work.  Some were more negative, as they realized actual teamwork is much more difficult or office politics are a problem or desk jobs can get boring. I started learning MAXQDA for the coding, by looking at the tutorials, and am slowly getting used to it.  It's a pretty cool piece of software!  Also, after reading these interviews and trying to interpret what people meant, I am determined to be a better interviewee and be more clear and specific in my answers! 

I also did some reading.  I read two papers, An Engineering Major Does Not An Engineer Make, and Should I Stay or Should I Go.  I found these very interesting, since I am conflicted about what I want to do with my engineering degree after I graduate.  I also read the rules to the Delta Design game - it looks like fun!  We'll now be working on how to scale the game for E14 (it is long and complicated at the moment). 

I listened to an interview team conference call, and got new insights into the challenges that face large groups working on a project together. At the DesignX meeting this week, Martin talked about different approaches to research and an electric car project they are working on. 

Michelle and I were also looking at personality tests, as part of a paper she wants to write.  It was fascinating, because we took the Meyers-Briggs test, and came out exactly the same personality (which completely surprised us!) and then we took another one that I managed to confuse, it couldn't decide what personality I was (which I thought was funny). 

And then the fun stuff - we did a wushu demo for an international girls' youth camp, which was fun because they were really impressed and all wanted us to teach them poses and take pictures with us at the end.  I got up early on Friday morning to watch the last space shuttle Atlantis launch, which made me sad, but at least it was a successful launch.  And this past weekend, my best friend came to visit, and with some of my friends, we went to Great America (where I lost my voice from screaming so much on roller coasters) and a Japanese festival, so it was a really fun weekend!